Migozino - Web based Content Generator and Editor

MIGOZINO is a web based generator and editor, used to make a personalized magazine based on the feeds and content in your social media accounts. Whether it was a holiday, one of those special moments in life or just a day with friends or family, you can archive and relive those precious moments in your own magazine.

The original idea for Migozino came about when the founder Eric van der Loo created a magazine year book in Microsoft Word for his wife. He created a magazine by simply Copy & Pasting posts from her Facebook timeline. Then I combined all these posts in a Word document and asked a local printer to make a hard copy glossy magazine. Everyone was very enthusiastic about the final result, and asked founder to make one for them as well. Because making the magazine took a lot of time, and he couldn’t change the layout quickly, so Eric had to say no, so he came to to Xplicity to make fully functional application.

Development process

Xplicity designed the website and application with some help from outside designers. One of the main development criteria is that we wanted to keep the magazine layout specifications outside of the application. Meaning that we wanted to be able to define and roll-out new magazine layouts without the need to change the application code. That is why we designed the Migozino Definition Language (MDL). Which is basically a XML based way of describing magazine layouts. These external layouts can be defined by non-programmers and uploaded and published on the site separately.

While developing we learned that we needed to integrate our product with different platforms like Mailchimp and Mandrill. We could of-course develop our own email services and functions, but it’s much better to integrate with platforms that are specialized in certain tasks. Both Mandrill and Mailchimp are market leaders and offer very good integration possibilities. So we choose to integrate with these platforms for all our e-mail communication. Both transactional (Mandrill) as well as campaign based (Mailchimp).

Final integration with social media

Facebook in particular is very precise and protective when it comes to privacy protection and what you do with the integration. Therefore each application that wishes to integrate with Facebook has to go through a formal and thorough review by Facebook. Basically what this means is that for each piece of integration information, we have to explain the benefit to their users. But this wasn’t a huge issue, since Facebook has a very good Developers and Review platform that helps you to go through the process very efficiently. The review process took around 4-6 weeks to complete and the Migozino integration received formal approval to integrate with Facebook.